Archive for June, 2009

Trivia on Twitter post 2 days

By Robert on June 19th, 2009

We’re closing in on our second day after launching Trivia on Twitter and it’s be a ton of fun watching this grow. We’ve had some issues, which I am sure people are aware of - specifically the LeaderBoard and people not getting credit for their answers. I wanted to take a moment and explain what happened and what we’ve been doing about it, but first I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has playing, tweeting about it and providing us with feedback. You guys are awesome!

As we said in our previous post, Trivia on Twitter is a joint venture between Stage Two Consulting and FACollective. We are thrilled to be working with Stage Two on this product. I’ve had the pleasure of working with them previously on Legacy Locker, which is a great product for storing your digital assets - if you haven’t checked it out, take a moment and look. We have a lot of plans for Trivia on Twitter and Triv140 that we’ll be talking about here and on the official twitter accounts in the future. So if you aren’t subscribed to this blog or following @trivia and @triv140, you really need to do so now, I’ll wait…

As I said, we had some issue with the leaderboard where we were exceeding Twitter’s Rate Limit of 100 requests an hour. While we had all the available information on twitter itself and our servers to remedy the issue, it did make people feel somewhat cheated. For that I apologize. It was my bad for not getting our servers white listed before releasing Trivia. This was however fixed rapidly with the help of the Twitter team, and we’d like to specifically thank Twitter’s Doug Williams and Jason Goldman. Thanks guys, you rock!!

While that takes care of future issues, we still had the past issues to remedy. To do so, I pulled an almost all nighter last night going through our system and twitter’s adding and updating all the accounts I could find that were in error. I wrote up some scripts that would process the answers for me and then double check what was updated to make sure it looked good. I know I probably missed some - it was late, I was really tired - but that fixes the issues we had remaining.

If you feel something isn’t right about your account you can either email support@triv140.com or go to our other product, Site Remark, and make a comment leaving your twitter screen name and what issues you are having. Don’t forget your twitter screen name. I’ll need that look it up in our system and then verify your answers as well as when they were answered. I will be actively watching both places and am adamant about keeping things open with our players.

Also, keep in mind that if you have a private account and you aren’t followed @trivia we cannot view your answers. You’ll need to follow @trivia in order for us to view and count your answers in our system. While you are at, follow @triv140 too. We’ll be sending out special announcements and various other things through that account.

We are committed to making sure everything is running as it should and making sure all players of the game are scored correctly. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience’s that have popped up and sincerely want you to know that we want to make this the best Trivia game out there.

Thanks again for playing Trivia on Twitter and Good Luck!

Trivia on Twitter (Triv140) Goes Live!

By John Moorhead on June 17th, 2009

Free Air Collective would like to announce a new company formed in partnership with Stage 2 Consulting.  The company, Triv140, utilizes this little thing called Twitter, and makes a game out of it.  Answer questions and win prizes… Simple as that.  The smartest, brightest and of course fastest will win prizes.

Just like Facebook, Twitter has been slow to come up with a revenue generating model.  We believe that this a strong tool to get people to pay attention to Tweets.  To be actively involved in the Tweeting process.  140 characters are not going to waste.

Not to be cliche, but we have been following the Twitter Trends, just like everyone else.

Jeopardy on Twitter.  Trivia Pursuit on Twitter.  You get the idea.

Did I mention that there are prizes?

On Twitter, we can be found at:  @trivia and on the Web at: TriviaonTwitter.com.

Play often, play today, and compete against all of our Twitter followers.  Just make sure that you still find time to sleep, eat and get some work done.

Triv140 is a white labeled option for corporations, conferences and groups to utilize.  If you want to hold a contest for a free prize with questions that center on your organization then sign up.  Contact us at sponsor@triv140.com for information.

Good luck!  It is game time!

info@triv140.com

Git Hooks

By Robert on June 13th, 2009

Like most development shops, we use Git for source code management and campfire for internal communications with our team. We have a lot of projects going on, so it is important for us all to be aware of what the other is working on and doing.

We’ve been using a post-commit hook which notifies our campfire room whenever someone commits their work locally. It spits out the message, who wrote the code, and a timestamp. Again, nothing unusual but rather common and a best practice.

One of the annoying things of doing this is having to repeat the steps, mostly cut/paste, for each project that we want to keep in our repository. This is pretty much any project and experiment that we might be working or tinkering with - we like to keep our experiments in a repository that we can glean from later.

In the spirit of being productive, efficient and destroying any nonsensically repetitive tasks, we wrote a little gem that will create our post-commit hooks for us and populate it with the necessary details (campfire subdomain, login, password, room) and place in the .git/hooks directory of our project and then make the file executable.

We aptly named it “githooks” and it has it’s own command line tool for getting the job done - albeit it is long: githooks project_name –login login –pass password –domain domain –room “Super Duper”

With that being fairly long for the sake of flexibility, you can create a bash script that will populate the login, password, domain and room for you, so you just need to pass in the project name, e.g. campfire_hook project_name

You can find the code, it’s open source, on github, githooks. There is a read me that goes over how to use githooks and how to create the bash script I spoke of. Currently, it only supports campfire - it is all we need - but if you need something else, feel free to fork it and submit patches.

An involuntary experiment in time constraints

By Jake on June 8th, 2009

I was awoken the other morning at 4am to the sound of rushing water. As I searched the house for the source, I found the sound coming from inside the laundry room wall opposite the garage. As I ventured into the garage, I found a flooded area as water poured out from under the wall. I investigated further in the backyard only to find that my dogs had pulled the hose (connected to the faucet) out and broke a pipe inside the wall. Needless to say it wasn’t the best way to wake up on a Saturday.

As usual, I had plans to get a lot of work done before my family woke up at 8. I like to get a good 3-4 hours in before the natives awake. I knew that I needed to get my water problem handled ASAP, but i still wrestled with the idea of getting a little work done prior (confessions of a work-a-holic, i know). I knew I needed to put my family and home first. So, I called the city and they had my water turned off by 4:45. I showed some grace by waiting til 6 to call the plumber. Meanwhile, I swept water out of the garage and used the wet vac for the rest. The plumber arrived at 6:30 and had everything fixed and running by 7:30. All before my family awoke at a quarter to eight.

Despite all that went on I managed to get quite a bit of design work done on a new project. It seems with the time constraints that I was more focused and decisive and therefore, more productive. I spent a lot of time working on it in my head and then executed swiftly when I had time to sit down to the computer.

It was a productive morning after all. I put my family and home as the priority and also learned some lessons about work in the process. It taught me that I don’t always need as much time as I think. I encourage you to give yourself some time constraints when tackling a project, you may find your performance increases. That being said, I don’t recommend breaking a water pipe in your house to do that. Try something a bit less destructive. I’d love to hear stories of what you do.

Respond below.

The Burden of Social Media

By John Moorhead on June 2nd, 2009

I recently read an article in Wired Magazine that I found ironic.  Why ironic?

The article, The Burden of Twitter by Steven Levy, talked about the guilt associated with not using your social sites enough.  The reasons are obvious, social sites are addicting as you get to peer into others lives, with little or no work.  You don’t have to maintain friendships, but can stare from a distance.  You don’t even need to engage in the practice of sharing until the guilt in your belly tells you that it is time.

What I find is ironic about these sites is the time they steal from you, and the pure volume of choices.

All of these sites remind me of yesteryear, and took me back to those days of having an IBM, green screen and typing in RunWin to get to a Word Document.  This morning here is a list of the things that I’ve logged into or opened up:

MacBook, MacBook Air and a Dell.

Programs I opened:

• Entourage
• Messenger
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Campfire
• iTunes

All of that in order to feel connected and ready to participate for the day.  I then sync my phone with my MacBook with Missing Sync, and stare at my desk.  Where do I begin?

It is amazing what is out there in order to communicate.  While working for VASCO Data Security, I had Email, phone, fax, cell, and IM… All of those ways I was able to be connected.

How do we simplify the login process for all of these sites, using a central identity?  How do we coordinate tasks across multiple applications?  How do we consolidate amongst different jobs, computers, and Email accounts?

We must be more efficient and yet survive with choices.

Stand Bias

By Jake on June 1st, 2009

No matter how hard we try to look at something objectively, our bias’ soon take over. Whether it’s food, art, cars or real estate, our preferences ultimately prevail when making decisions in the consumer space. When we are making a purchase you would think we would turn to objective facts and statistics right? Wrong. Instead, we turn to total strangers who rant on blogs, rave on twitter, or ramble on about a product or company. However, it’s not the fact that they are ranting, raving or reaming that matters; It’s the value of that response based on a person’s experience. When we can hear it from the mouth (or keyboard) of someone like us, we tend to follow suit.

That being said, I will pose this question: Are you as a company providing a platform for the ranters, ravers and ramblers to share their experiences with other current and potential customers? Giving your loyal customers a place to rave about your latest product or share a recent experience with your great customer service department allows them to sell your company to other people.

You may ask: What happens if they speak negatively of our product or company? The answer is simply, fret not. Authenticity is what your customers are looking for, so give it to them. Use criticism as an opportunity to communicate with your customers in front of everyone, and respond by improving your product based on that feedback. This shows them that you are willing to admit mistakes and fix them. More importantly though is the fact that your loyal customers will be there defending the company that they so love. A company who is willing to embrace this level of transparency is more likely to keep current customers and win new ones.

All of these are opportunities for you to communicate transparently with your clients, improve your products or services and show your commitment to your customers all while building community and encouraging the spreading of a bias based on good experience with your company.

Site Remark is a tool you can use to provide a forum for your customers to evangelize each other and promote authentic community around your company.  Sign up is easy; you could be giving your customers this remarkable privilege today.